PIONEERING A HUMANE CYBERWORLD
We live and work in the exciting age of digital transformation. The University of Twente’s mission as a people-first university of technology places us in the crossfire of digital advancement and the disruption it can cause. As scientists and tech pioneers, our task is to drive digitalization. As cross-disciplinarian connectors, we must take care that reality and virtuality are integrated safely, sustainably, and inclusively. As societal impactors, we face unpredictable forces and chart unknown territory, always intent on researching and co-designing solutions that will create a humane cyberworld. We are the Digital Society Institute.
With transformation comes vulnerability. As digitalization spreads further into the fabric of society, it is reshaping systems, redistributing power, and shaking up long-held notions of privacy, autonomy, democracy. As its influence grows less visible and more incomprehensible, we may approach a tipping point, beyond which people no longer manage digital technologies to influence and shape their surroundings, but our digitalized surroundings, almost unnoticeably, manage and manipulate us.
And with great power comes great responsibility. As experts in the field, we acknowledge the disruptive force of digitalization on societies, markets, and the lives of individual people – not least those belonging to population groups at risk, such as children, the elderly, the undereducated, and those living in the world’s least-developed countries. Against this backdrop, our mission at the Digital Society Institute is to play a leading role in establishing a humane cyberworld for everyone: a digital society that is technologically progressive and robust, as well as transparent, safe, sustainable, and inclusive. It is up to us to outsmart even our smartest innovations. To disrupt disruption. To avoid the divisiveness and wastefulness of digital dead-ends and mere technical prowess – and instead to research, develop and roll out solutions that will contribute to long-term societal, economic, and ecological gains.
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